Recently I was contacted by a PR rep for a service called Spinvox that I’m a big fan of and have been using for 8 months now. They solve a big problem that I had, which was that I loathed having to constantly check my voice mail. As many of you know, checking vmail quickly becomes one more Thing You Have To Do. Some of the most successful people i know routinely ask their friends to send them email since checking their personal voicemail never happens.

Spinvox changes all that.

The service affects me in two ways. First, i get an email transcription of my voicemails a few minutes after i miss a call, and since it goes to a gmail account, all my voicemail transcriptions are searchable. Second, getting the transcription lets me triage calls that i need to make and therefore i don’t always have to interrupt whatever I’m doing to take a call.

So, grateful for the free account I have (got it through techcrunch), i began researching the voicemail transcription space to get some background for my response. What i found was that many people, from the WSJ to other web entrepreneurs love the service but many of them aren’t paying for it. I took a look at their pricing model and quickly became apparent what feedback i was going to send their PR rep: Carrots work better than sticks!!

Spinvox charges 9.95/mo for 40 transcriptions and $0.45 for additional ones, Simulscribe has the same pricing for the first 40, with $0.25 for each additional one or 29.95/mo for unlimited transcriptions. Unlike most “freemium” models, this one makes me uncomfortable. Here’s why– check out my usage pattern:

December: 60 transcriptions ($9.00 additional)
November: 28 transcriptions (within plan)
October: 40 transcriptions (within plan)
September: 65 transcriptions ($11.25 additional)
August: 63 transcriptions ($10.35 additional)
This means in some months i would be going over my plan. What did this remind you of? Anyone? Cell phone plans. Which we all hate.

These services have really strong word of mouth. They can also be made viral (auto send me a transcription of my message so i see what Jim sees. You have my number after all, and I’d get to experience Spinvox for myself without having to click “Free Trial!”). However, if i know im going to waste half a buck by not picking up my phone, you can bet ill pick it up more and tell the person I’ll call back. Which means i’ll have to have some vague mental sense of how many minutes, i mean transcriptions, i have left. UReach, Spinvox’s US distribution partner, won’t let you roll over what you don’t use. Simulscribe would have me livid with thier unlimited plan once realized six months later that I’m wasting close to 20 bucks a month or 1/4th my total wireless plan cost.

Caveat: I don’t know their cost structure. But pricing plans ought to be data driven. So here’s my conclusion. If I’m a power user (I run a startup and a personal life off of this phone number) AND I’m only a few bucks above the 9.95 plan on average, who in the world is missing enough calls to justify a huge pricing plan?
At 30 bucks for unlimited messages, you leave most people wondering if being lazy is worth half the price of the average cell phone plan. People i evangelize the service to (i really do love it) tell me that it makes sense for me since i run a business but not for them since they’re benefit is one of convenience. Why would you want to have people grapple with whether they are power users?

I want to get it for my mom, but then I have to think about spending 30 bucks a month, or I have to wonder if she gets more than 40 messages a month. Why add one more thing to worry about? People should get thier voicemail transcribed and wonder where Spinvox has been all their lives rather than how many more calls they can miss before they have another fee to deal with.

The other day someone we were thinking of hiring complimented me by saying that i answered his questions well and in doing so gave him more information than he expected. I replied that in conversations with potential future stakeholders, from investors to new hires, I find that more is better than less. He remarked, I see you’ve been pitching for some time. I smiled.

Below is a letter i wrote today to someone younger than me who was looking to take on an ambitious new adventure. I told him that I’m rooting for him but he should plan well. After writing it i realized that this sort sums up everything we’ve learned in the first year of building a company.

In between keeping it real and being so freaking revolutionary, it seems we’re also becoming pragmatic.

[Redacted],

What we were talking about was maximizing the chances of success of your plan.

A plan, by definition, has a primary goal and several subordinate goals. A successful plan is one where at least the primary goal is achieved. Of the set of successful plans (a small subset of all plans ever made), primary goals achievements are the largest part. Some plans nail everything, this rarely happens and luck may play an significant part.

As a team leader I’ve learned that you have to have a primary goal. A strategy to do many things is a strategy to do nothing at all. So, i guess being able to state that goal is pretty important here. Examples include, getting into a top tier MBA school, raising company revenue 10% each year, etc, but there can only be one. Imagine that this is a straight line.

Next, identify subordinate goals. Have a gf, a social life, workout more, get a degree, etc, could be examples. Imagine that these subordinate goals make your line squiggly. Having a squiggly line doesn’t mean you don’t succeed, in fact this is called multitasking, and most successful people do it. However, the more amplitude or “noise” you have in your line, the harder it will be to achieve your primary goal.

Once you have a set of goals you need to accurately mark where you are now. Where you are now is a function of where you came from and, since nothing is static, where you were heading as of the moment you decided to evaluate a plan. P=MV, or momentum is the significance of where you’re heading at this moment multiplied by the intensity of this effort (people, money, materiel). This momentum is the line you already have (you didn’t think you were starting from scratch did you?? That only happens two or three times in your whole life).

The fun part of making Plans and Models is they don’t consider friction. As someone who is just beginning to get some Experience, i think Experience is really just the ability to guesstimate the amount of friction inherent in a plan. People who have Achieved often say they would never have started if they knew how hard it was going to be. That, and having too much to lose, is probably why older Achieved people don’t do new disruptive things. They usually chalk this up to Experience. But just because some of us will go on to do big disruptive things and overcome friction, doesn’t mean that it should be discounted. Investors want to know about traction, virality, user acquisition plans, who runs product, and whats my facebook strategy because in their own adorable way, they’re trying to get comfortable with the amount of friction their funds will have to overcome to build momentum.

Anyway, making a plan happen, from changing yourself to convincing other people, is easier when your new not-too-squiggly-line doesn’t have too much Mu and isn’t too far away from today’s line.

So here you are in the midst of making this big plan. You need a primary goal and you need to deeply understand and reconcile yourself with whats subordinate. Then you have to figure out where you’re already heading, what it takes to turn the ship around, and whether its truly worth it. Other things to keep in mind is how to measure and keep track of all these things. You have to navigate, after all, and they wouldn’t have made this a special job on B-22s and pirate ships if were an easy thing to do.

I’m pretty sure this works for everything, from what product to make to planning a land war in Asia. (Too!Much!Friction!)

Don’t tase me bro,

Avi

Thanks everyone for giving us this year of extraordinary experiences. Have a wonderful new year, we’ll see you in 2008.

Haven’t posted in a while. It’s because we’re in a mode.

Modes:

Cranking mode

“Heads Down Mode”

Hardcore development mode

I think ive figured out how to get two work days from one human day mode

Remarkably lucid mode

Uh-oh mode

wtf I cant believe i got my first crack at the new radiohead album through fred wilson’s blog mode

Sniper rifling Master Chief mode

I’m not sure yet, but i think i figured out a new network effect mode
Proud of work product mode

What mode are you in?

Sometimes on a Friday, the “little things” in your inbox make a huge difference…

Obviously, adoption is a difficult thing to achieve.  Its tough for juggernaut companies like Apple or NBC, and you can see this by the fact that they use multi-billion dollar ad budgets to convince you to do stuff.  Startup don’t have Convincing Budgets, so most distribution channels aren’t available.  Therefore, founders and investors alike tend to focus on organic ways to acquire users. These are Viral, Network, and Word-of-Mouth Effects.

Founders: Learn the differences. When talking about user adoption, please don’t use these as synonyms for “up and to the right for free”. There are subtle and stunningly important differences, and at worst you will look like a fool talking to an investor who knows the difference and at best just be talking to one that doesn’t (or maybe thats the worst?).

Virality: self-replicating. Like a virus. Simply through the act of becoming a user, that user causes other users to be acquired.  If each user causes 1.01 additional users, you are viral.

Network Effect: Your service becomes more valuable for every user through the act of an additional user joining.

Word-of-Mouth Effect: Your service is so fantastic that people talk about it to each other. Through the act of telling someone else, the user causes other users to be acquired.

The important thing to consider is the act and who is taking the action.  This should lead you to better understand what you can control and what feature tweaks you can make to influence the relevant actor to act.

So, is your service like a virus? No? Fine. Now stop saying it will be viral.

More detail on each effect as soon as i can clear out my inbox.

Will turned 33 this week, widely believed to be Jesus’s age when he was crucified. Will didn’t seem too nervous about this comparison, but instead told us how relieved he was to have lived past the ripe old rockstar age of 27. Turns out most developers possess an almost immortal life span…

You never know what your cubicle neighbor is listening to. What was once shrouded in mystery, has now been revealed!

It seems that we are all music listeners. This is no suprise. How many people actually work while listening to John Grisham novels? And we aren’t just listening to amplified system sounds in the privacy of our own head. Although admittedly, we are all guilty of pausing our player occasionally and then forgetting to remove our headphones, essentially listening to nothing. A decoy perhaps for eavesdropping on the snack-conscious conversations of others?

A brief informal survey, (soon to be represented in a bubble chart), has given us insight into the personalities and preferences of some of our team members.

Avi: On rotation: the Klaxons and orchestral Led Zeppelin (he is really excited about this latter genre.) Always armed with a coffee, brownie bite and a heavy string section.

Ori: Perhaps our most well-rounded listener, Ori lists Gorillaz, Nigerian 70s jazz, and Vivaldi as his favorites. He makes it very clear that heavy coding requires music without vocals. Are our parent-child scripts courtesy of Brahms?

Marc: Who knew that Marc was listening to hip hop while getting our wireframes in order. He mentioned an Ice Cube song, but this blog rejects expletives so I can’t mention it by name.

Eric: White Stripes and Jack Johnson are on Eric’s phones, and he admits that unlike Ori, he does code to songs with vocals. Isn’t it ironic that Eric may prefer the “unplugged?”

Will: Quicksand (not TOO aggro heavy metal) is on Will’s playlist. Will says he likes listening to the same thing over and over… thank God he’s wearing headphones!

Katie: She likes electronica, specifically Hot Chip and prefers something very upbeat in the morning, when all other lab technicians are busy injesting coffee intravenously.

Lynn: Lynn has recently discovered Finley Quaye, the modern “Bob Marley” with a jazz twist. And her guilty pleasure is 60s music with lots of harmonies that she can sing to while working. This habit is thankfully reserved for days when she’s telecommuting…

Patrick: We can only speculate, but he does harbor quite a musical ringtone. Let’s investigate. Add this to our task list.

At the Lab, conversation can swing from algorithms to the genetic history of cauliflower at the drop of a hat.  I, for one, was not aware that cauliflower and broccoli are relatives of cabbage.

In case you are curious … which I was:

When the domestication of plants began, people planted leafy vegetables. Naturally the plants with the largest leaves were preferred since they increased the consumable yield. Those plants with the largest leaves were propagated an each generation. The end result was an ever larger and leafier plant.

Centuries later a preference for the plants with a tight cluster of young leaves at the centee of the plant pushed the selection and cultivation toward plants that exhibited these traits. Many generations later .. we have cauliflower and broccoli.

More information can be found here.

Happy eating.

As we write code, we find that we have to think about our Next Most Important Constituent. We’re writing software for Ourselves and our Friends, building a company where Smart People want to join the Team, working on models that Users will adopt, weaving a story that the Press wants to cover, and doing this in a way that makes Investors giddy at the idea of giving us more money (still working on that last one, check back with me in a bit and ill let you know how that goes).

Yesterday over lunch at ‘wichCraft (Marc: amazingly well balanced sandwiches) we talked about whether it makes more sense to build for firefox or for cross browser usage. Thats a NeMIC question. Right now we’re after users and investors, but since almost everyone we know (techies and non) use Firefox, I argued that we can get away with supporting one browser for now. Investors were a group that i had less insight on. I’ve met with many VCs but i don’t think i can yet put them into buckets and ascribe behavior patterns. So, im wondering:

What browsers to VC’s use?

I’m going to send out an email and report back on the split. I’ll keep it anonymous, unless the VC in question wants thier name named. (probably a good idea if you feel strongly about your choice, given that entrepreneuers are a nutty bunch that generally respect the idea of having a strong feeling about doing something).